Archive for the ‘Announcement’ Category



An update on waze flags…and how to get one if you haven’t already completed the necessary steps

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Had a little glitch in the production of the waze flags and it’s a bummer, but it’s still gonna take about 3-4 more weeks for them to get to us, then another 1-2 for us to pack and ship them out to you guys, but sit tight!, we promise they’re on their way…

And if you’re just hearing about the waze flags for the first time and want one, you can still get in on the promo, all you have to do is  visit waze on Facebook, like this wall posting related to waze flags, and leave a comment in the comments sections answering the question ‘What do you love most about waze?’ After you post your comment, we’ll follow up with you within 24-48 hours to get your mailing address, and that’s it – easy as pie.

Again, for those of you who have been waiting, we offer our humble apologies, but once you’re drivin’ with your waze flag flappin’ in the wind, we promise it will have been well worth the wait.

Waze is taking off!!

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

Hey fellow Wazers -

2010 has been a wild ride at Waze.  Thanks to our amazing area managers, mappers and global users, we have grown to over 2.2 Million drivers!  We have expanded our service to over 100 countries, and rolled out support for the 5 major smart phone OS’es, which is bringing the power of the social web to the driving experience in a whole new way.

We believe strongly that, since traffic is a social phenomenon, the solution must be social as well.  We have built our service around crowdsourcing real time driving data and have seen the value of this data grow – for our users and every day commuters, as well as commercial data companies and advertisers.

So it is with great pride that we announce we have closed $25m of funding, in a round led by our existing investors, Blue Run Ventures, Magma and Vertex, together with new strategic investors, including Qualcomm Ventures.   We would like to thank our existing investors for their support and welcome our new investors, as we look forward to their help in making our service even better.

With this fresh funding we are hiring extensively and planning to grow our amazing team on all fronts. First, we will expand our US HQ in Silicon Valley in terms of people and relocate to a larger office – we have outgrown our space here a bit ;-) We are also looking for talented people to help scale our service and build new functionality. Mostly, we need to continue to build our platform for real-time location data, where we are competing with the largest tech companies in the world, and can now build the corresponding organization!

So what’s in store for 2011?  First of all – we have big plans to improve and grow our service.  Lots of great features, functionality and infrastructure upgrades (prepare for a blazing fast Cartouch…).  Second – this will be the year of opening up our platform – data, API’s, access (more to come soon)…  Third – We plan to take crowdsourcing further than it has ever gone before.  We want media companies to engage users as citizen journalists, and NBC2 is just the first step toward this. We want to enable local governments to encourage users to report about hazards on the road to help keep our roads safe.  We want major brands to provide wazer’s with incentives to visit their establishment, helping you find deals on the road…  We have lots of big plans for 2011, and now have the funding to achieve them.

So – things are just taking off.  The future is social–come join us for the ride!

Noam (@noamb11) and the Waze Team (@waze)

Waze launches officially in Italy!

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

We’re happy to announce our ‘official’ launch in Italy today, though the community there has been growing strong and steady for quite a while under the tutelage of some very active users. Similar to our launch in France and Germany a few weeks ago, this launch will also feature a developed road grid, which we’ll merge with data that local users have already contributed on their own.

In order to turn the grid into a fully functioning map, Italian wazers will just need to validate road directions by driving on the roads themselves, and add road names via waze’s online map editor. When the whole community gets involved, as we expect many of the Italians to do – like they’ve been doing for a while now, the entire process is incredibly quick,  and within just a couple of weeks, the Italian maps will be fully navigable and super accurate.

We thank all you Italians for your hard work up to this point, and we look forward to seeing how your community develops now that the base maps will make waze even more valuable. Keep us up to date and let us know if there’s anything you need…happy wazing!

Waze officially launched in Ecuador via partnership with Location World

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

A couple of months ago we announced our international partnership program. Through these partnerships, waze receives base maps that are quickly transformed by local wazer communities into fully navigable live maps. Our local partner benefits from a constant stream of updates to their base maps.  Our first partnership was formed with leading  South American map maker – Location World. We are very happy to have officially launched, together with them, a fully localized service in Ecuador.


Here’s a look at the city of Quito this morning.  Users seem happy. Quito is known for being constantly jammed.  So far we’ve launched on iPhone, Android and Nokia, but many Ecuadorians are still waiting for the Blackberry version, since nearly 70% of Ecuador smartphones are BlackBerry.  The Black Berry is in Beta and will be released within a week or two so we should expect to see many more wazers cruising in Ecuador very soon.

(There will be a slight delay until we can make Blackberry available to users of other places in the world as it requires building a specific re-build of tiles specifically for BB)

Ecuadorian wazers, let us know what you think!

Official waze launch in Germany and France!

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Though fledgling driving communities have already developed in both Germany and France, today, we’re happy to announce our official launch in these countries. Bonjour and Guten tag, friends!

German and French wazers can now benefit from:

  • a brand new road grid
  • UI and voice prompts in their own languages
  • a road full of ‘goodies’ to help new users rack up points as they help improve the navigability of the map in their areas
  • AND…treasure chests that may contain Amazon giftcards!

Road grids that will quickly become navigable maps

Up until recently, users in these areas needed to record roads entirely from scratch, however, we’ve received access to a comprehensive set of German and French road grids, which we’ll merge with data that local users have already contributed on their own, and – poof! – these communities will be off to a fantastic start. All that’s missing in order to turn the grid into a fully functioning map is for local wazers to validate road directions by driving on the roads themselves, and to add road names via waze’s online map editor.

Road goodies and virtual treasure chests for extra points and prizes!

Starting today, French and German users will find that most roads will be marked with plenty of ‘road munching’ dots – GPS points that, when driven over, set the road’s direction, helping to increase map quality and navigability, while providing them with tons of extra points. The process of validation is incredibly quick – within just a couple of weeks, these maps will be fully navigable and highly accurate. We’ll also be adding candy and cupcake ‘road goodies’ – small icons worth 3 and 5 bonus points, respectively – to the map in areas where the system needs validation.

…And don’t forget the best part: waze’ll be distributing VIRTUAL TREASURE CHESTS (!) on the roads that, when driven over, have the potential to reward users with an Amazon gift card – so French and German wazers, get out there and find ‘em!

What’s to come?

Stay tuned to the waze blog for the official launch of driving communities in other areas…we’re working on a bunch of stuff that you’re gonna want to know about…

Laptop magazine declares waze one of the best mobile startups of 2010

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

laptop

Pretty kewl. Laptop magazine selected us as one of their best mobile start ups of 2010. Not a bad way to start off the day!

Waze to speak at TechCrunch Mobile 2010 in Barcelona + more…

Monday, February 1st, 2010

 

barcelona1

Come the third week of February each year, the city of Barcelona is transformed by the Mobile World Congress into an international hive of the mobile industry’s who’s who, so of course we’re looking forward to hopping over there to make our peers aware of waze, and all we have to offer.

If you’ll be attending the congress, make sure to mosey on by our space in the Smaato booth and say hello! We’ll be in Hall 7, the ‘Apps Hall’, in booth 7C38.

Other places you can check us out are at the Mobile Premiere Awards, on February 15. We’re up for the ‘Mobile Monday Innovator of the Year’ award  and Noam, our CEO, is gonna rock his 3 minute presentation. That’s not to say that the competition isn’t super stiff – ‘cause it is. We’re looking forward to sharing the stage with all kindsa cool apps, from augmented reality startups, Layar, to LBS apps, like Aloqa. You can check out all the finalists here and can purchase tickets for the event here.

Additionally, you can find us at the TechCrunch mobile 2010 meet up, an interactive and live-video-streamed session featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile startups and investors in Europe, on February 17. Tickets to the event can be purchased here. Noam will be presenting at 2:50pm on the topic of “Using mobile apps to crowdsource data into a service.” Should be a good one.

And last, and by no means least, we’re working to organize a meet up with our area managers and users in the Barcelona area. Stay tuned to @waze_es for information about where and when we plan to gather folks. It’s gonna be a real good time!  :-)

Waze annouces partnership with Location World, a leading South American location services provider

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Location World

Big news on the international front – we’ve just partnered with Location World, the largest location-based services and solutions company in South America, based in Ecuador, with a strong, fast growing presence in additional Latin American countries including Panama, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Columbia and Chile.

What does this mean for our users in those locations? Well, Location World is providing us with some great base maps and this means that community growth will be significantly accelerated so that users can get waze’s free turn-by-turn navigation and real time traffic information from day one, rather than waiting until the countries are first mapped. We’ve rolled out the base maps in Ecuador already (http://www.ec.waze.com), and the surrounding countries will soon follow.

We expect community growth in this region to accelerate very quickly, and we’re sending out a warm welcome to all of you who are about to join the world’s largest global driving community – we’re glad to have you on board!

Waze now available internationally – put your country on the map!

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

worlds

In our humble attempt to take over the world one traffic lane at a time, waze is proud to announce today that we’ve gone global! Wazers from all around the world are now able to use our platform to build crowdsourced maps, 100% from scratch. In fact, in certain countries with no base map, users will literally be building maps from scratch – paving the roads entirely themselves, as they drive…

Already, driving communities have organically formed in over 20 countries around the globe, including Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Thailand, Kazakhstan, and Trinidad Tobago – and people have even begun map editing their regions online at world.waze.com.

The funny part is that even before we opened up the platform for international use, we’d see wazers in clusters on the map in areas with no waze support, self-organizing to  check out what we have to offer. In fact, in Singapore, the highway grid was mapped in just a few days by a handful of active users! We thought it was a pretty amazing thing to see, so we decided to formally open waze to users, worldwide, so everyone can enjoy crowdsourced maps and, eventually, free navigation, turn-by-turn directions +  an improved daily commute.

Help us spread the word to your friends in far away places – the more wazers on the road, the more everyone benefits!

Announcing ‘You can go your own waze,’ the new waze user blog – by users, for users

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

people

Since every other part of our product is user-generated, we wondered what would happen if we created a blog giving users a voice to share their thoughts on, and experiences with, waze, and thus ‘You can go your own Waze’ (apologies to Fleetwood Mac…) was born.

We’re looking for users to share their experiences – this can be anything from a video showing you using the app out there on the road, to short postings sharing tips, how-to posts, pictures or fun lists. Additionally, we’d be happy to see your posts on topics tangentially related to waze – cars, driving, traffic, maps, relevant technology, etc.

We’re really excited to see how it’ll take shape and we invite you all to join in – be it as bloggers or as regular readers and commentors. Also, if you’d like to start contributing yourself but don’t yet have permissions to do so, just drop a quick email request to alli@waze.com and we’ll be happy hook you up.

Let’s do this thing!